Productive By Design

After my first post on the subject, I will show you something more practical : how I achieve Inbox Zero and combine it with some GTD principles within an e-mail client.

As I was using (and I’m still using) Thunderbird as e-mail client at work, I look more precisely for a GTD-style implementation of Inbox Zero with it. I found many articles and blog posts on the topic and one of them inspired me more than the others.

The keys of the implementation are :

• Saved Search folders : Thunderbird permits to create rather advanced Saved search folders based on many criteria.
• Tags : in Thunderbird, you can tag an e-mail just by hitting a numeric key (1-9), and you can define the tag name and tag color. You can even set multiple tags for an e-mail.

With this, you can handle a huge amount of e-mails in a short time just with the keyboard and keep them well-organized. So how do you achieve this ?

First in Thunderbird preference panel, add your tags.  The 6 tags I use :

• Action Required : important e-mail for an action that needs to be done really soon and for which I don’t want to create a task in my todo list application (“Remember The Milk”).
• Delegated : when I forward an e-mail to ask someone to do something, I tag it as ‘Delegated’ in order not to forget about it.
• Archive : most used tag (with ‘Delete’), I archive almost all of my e-mails when no more action is needed.
• Delete : why a ‘Delete’ tag and not just deleting the e-mail ? I prefer to give me some time before deleting a work e-mail, just in case.  One of the tasks of my monthly review is : “delete e-mails from my @Delete smart folder”. Beside this, I directly trash all useless e-mails and junk-mails that go through the spam filter.
• Personal : most of the e-mail I get from my wife and my friends at work get tagged ‘Personal’, the rest of them is deleted.
• Wait : sometimes you need something to be done by someone before being able to take action with an e-mail. Those e-mails are easy to forget and need to be tagged with the ‘Wait’ flag.

Once you have created your tags (you may need other ones to fit your particular needs), you need to add smart folders.

My 7 saved search folders can be grouped in 3 parts :

• Quick access simple saved search folders : these are @Action Required, @Delegated, @Delete and @Wait. I put those first because they have to be frequently checked. These smart folders are pretty straightforward to create : Tags contains the corresponding tag.
• Non-quick access simple saved search folders : this category contains @Archive and @Personal smart folders. I don’t access these folders as much as the preivous ones,thus they come after.  These smart folders are also straightforward to create : Tags contains the corresponding tag, again.
• Quick access complex saved search folder : this one is the most important one : @Next Action, almost everything is done here. I process all my incoming e-mails from this folder. For this smart folder, you need to add 3 criteria, and match all of the criteria : Tags doesn’t contain Archive, Tags doesn’t contain Delete and Tags doesn’t contain Personal.

I review the different folders on a weekly basis to be sure not to forget something, and to see if some e-mails can be transferred to my todo lists.

I’m still using message filters to move some incoming message to normal folders. I’m only using this for 2 types of e-mails : mailing list subscription and CVS/SVN e-mails, that’s all. These mails are not so important, so to keep focus with my most important e-mail flow, I check these folders only once each couple of days.

This is my setup of e-mail productivity with Thunderbird (I think it doesn’t work with IMAP mailboxes). I’ve used it for a couple of years and I’m very happy with it. I never got more than 5 e-mails in my Next Action folder.

At last, you can add the Lightning extension to integrate a calendar and a todo list directly in Thunderbird and have a complete tool for organizing your time and your tasks.

The last part of the post on e-mail productivity will be about the setup I’ve at home, with Apple Mail.

Geoffrey

Related posts:

1. Email Productivity : Inbox Zero
2. Email Productivity : Apple Mail
3. Deal with your information flow
4. Top 15 Productivity Apps for iPhone – Part 3
5. Top 15 Productivity Apps for iPhone – Part 1